White Mulberry Morus alba
White Mulberry is an introduced perennial tree, found in Canada, Hawaii, and the lower 48 states. It grows to 50 ft and blooms Mar in full sun – part shade, with purple fruit.
White Mulberry is flagged invasive in the U.S. These natives fill a similar niche — same growth habit, bloom season, height, and region — so you keep the look and feed local wildlife instead of spreading a problem.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- Low moisture
- Soil pH
- 5–7
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 6+
- Drought tolerance
- Moderate
- Shade tolerance
- Low
- Wet-soil tolerance
- Low waterlogging
- Height
- 50 ft
- Mature width
- ≈ 60 ft wide open-grown, the broad end of measured crowns
- Spacing
- 9–16 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Single stem
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Purple
- Propagate by
- Seed, Cuttings, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
- Seeds ripen
- Spring – Summer seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- Resprouts if cut
- Yes regrows after top-kill
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~9 caterpillar species
Morus supports ~9 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a modest genus.
Recorded feeding on Morus in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 2 bee visitors
2 native & managed bee species are documented visiting White Mulberry :
Wildlife & visitors 105 birds · 3 mammals · 5 nectaring
Open records of who else uses White Mulberry — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 105 birds and 3 mammals species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
+ 3 more species → ↑ show fewer
5 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Morus →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (37) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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